Paris
Galerie Kamel Mennour
4 Sep → 30 Oct 2021
From Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 7 pm. Closed Sunday & Monday.
The "superimposed objects" are the signature of Bertrand Lavier. As their names indicate, they are simply two totally different objects placed one on top of the other. For example, here, we can find a sofa in the shape of a mouth on a freezer. But it is not just any sofa! It is the one designed by Salvador Dalì in 1936 taking the shape of the lips of the famous Mae West. By placing it on any Haier freezer, this composition reminds us of the duchampian readymade. And yet, the approach of the two artists is totally different. Bertrand Lavier does not choose these objects at random but according to their forms and the concordance of these. With La Bocca/Haier, he makes dialogue the curve of the lips and the right angle of the freezer. Everything is thought out in such a way that the forms, the colors, the sizes and proportions match perfectly. By confronting a work of Dada art with a banal object, Bertrand Lavier creates a dynamic that is both amusing and pleasant to look at. Since the 1970s, Bertrand Lavier has been questioning the place of the work of art in everyday life and its nature by placing everyday objects in spaces dedicated to art. Whether they are modified, hybrid or superimposed, these objects are erected to the status of work of art. It is in this dynamic that the French artist realizes at the beginning of his career of the photographs of objects of the everyday life that, later, he covers with a thick layer of painting giving to see the object and the image of the object at the same time. Later, he invented these famous "superimposed objects", which became his signature.